OURS is an unpredictable world, shaped by sporadically violent physical
forces. Frightened and disturbed, we have reshaped it in our imagination. The
world—or at least the natural world—then becomes, if not humane,
then at least humanly bearable when perceived through the art, language and
politics of our cultures.

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Nature, significantly, is a category into which we have traditionally put
diseases, famines, accidents, poisons, predators, ageing processes—every
nonhuman thing that can kill us. Nature is necessary to society because it is
through ideas of what is “natural” we come to accept as a society the lethal
risks we run as individuals.

But one way to comprehend and thus tame nature is to map it. Collecting
curiosities to display and categorise, for example, shows that a controlling
force has been exerted, a practice followed by the writers of three books that
set out to explore what we now understand nature to mean and how this came
about.

The first, the handsome Wonders and the Order of Nature by Lorraine
Daston and Katherine Park, recalls the “marvellous nature” that held sway in
Europe from around 1150 to around 1750. This was not simply a nature of sports
and curiosities, but, more to the point, a nature imagined by a culture that we
no longer recognise as our own. The authors remind us that when we make room for
wonder and curiosity, our society becomes inevitably driven towards scientific
study and development.

Today, however, we are becoming increasingly aware of a new and diverse set
of great and terrible threats to our survival. These events have yet to be
culturally assimilated: they seem, therefore, profoundly unnatural.

In Contested Natures, Phil Macnaghten and John Urry trace the way
our culture is responding to and articulating these new threats and, in the
process, how this work is reshaping our idea of nature. What these
threats—pollutants, losses of genetic diversity, environmental changes and
so on—have in common and what distinguishes them from the other big
killers—war and murder—is that they stem from inadvertent human
activity. It seems sinister that such threats defy our culturally sanctioned
ideas of space and time. They are not limited to place: wreaking havoc in one
location may cause lasting damage to innocents in places far away. Neither are
they limited by time: pesticides and other toxins may build up too slowly and
idiosyncratically in our food and water and air for us to calculate what
immediate action can be taken to protect ourselves. As individuals we are
powerless to detect, let alone defend ourselves against, many of these threats.
In short, our society is doing us untold, untellable damage, and there isn’t a
thing our culture can do (yet) to make us feel better about it. Macnaghten and
Urry are fascinated by this transitional state. “Nature”, they point out, hardly
figures in our conversations any more: it has been replaced by “the
environment”. Thus a threatened environment is superseding a nature of
threats.

The authors are very good on matters of social trust, and how in Britain
culturally unassimilated threats are eroding the democratic contract between
governors and governed. They are good on environmental protest, on issues of
access, and on the way the landscape has been turned into a commodity.

Armed with Macnaghten and Urry’s analytical tools, it is easy for us to
anatomise the political agenda of Jules Pretty, whose book The Living
Land offers a third view of nature. Pretty deals with agriculture, the
tamed interface between the wild and the human. He marshals the medical, social
and economic arguments for a more sustainable agricultural policy. His concerns
are global, but, for convenience, he uses the postwar history of agriculture in
Britain as his focus. Around 1950, about half the money spent on food came back
to the farmer and rural community. The rest went to suppliers of feeds,
pesticides, machinery and so on—and to processors and retailers. Since
then, the middle has steadily lost out. A quarter of households in rural Britain
have fallen below the poverty line. A third or more parishes have no shop, pub
or village hall, and a half have no school. Two-thirds of parishes have no
public transport.

Pretty envisions a sustainable agriculture which “takes back the middle”,
gradually eschewing external inputs like pesticides, inorganic fertilisers and
baroque machinery in favour of increased research, education, management skills
and labour. This, he argues, offers huge opportunities for rural people. His
chief strategy is to render down everything, including quality of life, to its
money value. The conclusions he draws from his calculations are subtly
iconoclastic.

Macnaghten and Urry would call Pretty’s book “environmental instrumentalism”,
and might reasonably go on to question its narrow, money-oriented description of
human behaviour. But, because their own approach in Contested Natures
is primarily bookish, they are at the mercy of their own narrow academic
culture. They can’t help but reflect its shortcomings. If there is little
academic coverage of an aspect of nature, they have little to say about it. For
example, take the use we make of “nature” for leisure space. Here, physical
activities that fall outside usual categories elude them, such as the non-sports
of rock-climbing, mountain-biking, snowboarding and surfing. All are growing in
popularity: crucially, they possess multiple, fluid and often antagonistic
ethical systems. Most alpine skiers expect the slopes they ski to be part of a
commercial enterprise; their ethical system is that of the market. Snowboarders
want snow and little but snow and many resent creeping commercialism. Non-sports
strive to preserve selectively natural features and environments so that they
may be used unsentimentally (if not downright brutally) as resources. So they
deserve a paragraph, at least, and get nothing. Artificial nature parks, for
some unfathomable reason, do. There is something middle-aged and middle-brow
about the hierarchy operating here, but in the end it can take little away from
Macnaghten and Urry’s ambitious and encyclopedic account.

Macnaghten and Urry are never less than gobsmacked at the fact that nature
can become a cultural artefact. Nor are they immune to a few cultural
peculiarities of their own—who else would caption a picture of a couple
out dog-walking with “Walking dogs as a spatial practice”? When not dazzled by
their own perceptiveness, however, they can be remarkably perceptive.
Contested Natures does, in the final balance, live up to its provocative
title.